Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault were both born on October 15. Nietzsche in 1844, and Foucault 82 years later, in 1926. Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault stated: “I am a Nietzschean.”

On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, never have I seen so many and such good things together. Not in vain have I buried my forty-fourth year today. I was entitled to bury it — what there was of life in it is rescued, is immortal. (…)

The happiness of my existence, its unique character perhaps, lies in its fatefulness. (…)

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.— Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion—religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.— I want no “believers”; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses.— I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me.

I do not want to be a holy man; sooner even a buffoon.— Perhaps I am a buffoon. (…) I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.— My genius is in my nostrils.”

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is), 1888 }

“You are most frequently termed “philosopher” but also “historian”, “structuralist”, and “Marxist”. The title of your chair at the College de France is “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought”. What does this mean?

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.

(…)

The classical age is pivotal in all your writings. Do you feel nostalgia for the clarity of that age or for the “visibility” of the Renaissance when everything was unified and displayed?

All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia. I know very well that it is our own invention. But it’s quite good to have this kind of nostalgia, just as it’s good to have a good relationship with your own childhood if you have children. It’s a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it’s a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present. But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present, it has to be excluded.

Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault | October 25th, 1982

What makes us who we are, modern people, people of the 20th century, people from the occident, compared with others civilizations and cultures that are foreign to us — chinese, muslim, hindi, pre-colombian cultures, whatever — I believe that spontaneously we would say: that the occidental civilization is the only one, probably on the whole surface of the globe, and in all the history of the world, that gave the man such an important role. It’s our civilization, and maybe only it, that made the man the king of the creation.

Everywhere else, the social structures, the constraint of the religions, the pressure of the economic facts, the famines, the demographic developments, etc, don’t allow Man the importance he has in our culture. There, he is caught inside a network where he is just a dot, while in our civilization, Man occupies the most important space in our culture and in our knowledge.

{ Michel Foucault | audio 1 | audio 2 }

Why is it that you don’t engage in polemics?

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism�” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model.

{ Michel Foucault interview by Paul Rabinow | May 1984 }

photo { The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 }

Michel Foucault and Kate Moss pushing a Mercedes, 2 days ago.

{ CelebPic }

+ previously { Nietzsche and Foucault } + { Kate Moss by Marc Quinn }